He then became a Marshalsea Court officer, and ran a sponging-house in Vinegar Yard, off Brydges Street, opposite the south side of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

[4] Shortly the family moved to a house in Ship and Anchor Court, near Temple Bar, London.

[5] In June 1780, Simon Place became a publican and moved his family to the Kings Arms, in Arundel Street, off the Strand.

[8] It established that Simon Place (surname as "Plaise" in the register) had married Anna Peters at Fleet Prison, on 29 October 1747.

[12] In 1793 Place became involved in and eventually the leader of a strike of leather-breeches makers, and was refused work for several years by London's master tailors; he exploited this time by reading.

[15] Edward Pearce wrote: The point so rarely grasped is how difficult it was to be Paine, Cobbett, Place, Hunt, Carlile and Attwood.

He left the LCS as one of a Godwinite group who wished to proceed by publication and discussion of reformist ideas, rather than political agitation.

[12] The West London Lancasterian Association, however, became an unfortunate experience for him: he and his ally John Richter were pushed off the committee by Francis Burdett in 1814, in a high-handed move with some Spenceans accusing them of being spies.

[30] At the time of the founding of the London Mechanics' Institution in 1823, Place was involved with George Birkbeck, in fund-raising.

His proposals were unpopular with the radicals Hodgskin and Joseph Clinton Robertson, who looked for greater autonomy, but were carried through.

He published Illustrations and Proofs of the Principles of Population, in 1822, engaging with the views of both Thomas Malthus and William Godwin.

[12][32][33] In 1823, with Benthamite volunteers and anonymous backers, he launched a handbill campaign, concentrating on London's Spitalfields area.

The effort tarnished his reputation for many years, but provoked further pioneering works in English by Richard Carlile, Robert Dale Owen and Charles Knowlton.

[35] In 1830, Place helped support Rowland Detrosier, a working class radical activist who also sought to distance himself from socialism.

In the London Working Men's Association, he and William Lovett in 1838 drafted the document that became the People's Charter.

In later life he wrote his autobiography and organised the collections he had made: notes, pamphlets, newspapers and letters.

His support was largely expressed in organisational work for Burdett's electoral committee in the Westminster constituency.

He brought a house at 6, Foxley Terrace, Earls Court, Kensington, and lived there with his two unmarried daughters, Mary and Jane.

[46] Place's pamphlets, letters, magazine and newspaper articles throw light on the social and economic history of the nineteenth century.

The British Library currently holds these documents in fifty-four reels of micro-film as the Francis Place Collection.